President Joe Biden has booked his first television interview since his disastrous debate with former President Trump last week, which prompted many in his party to wonder whether he should be the Democratic nominee.

On Friday at 6:30 p.m. ET, ABC will carry portions of George Stephanopoulos’ interview with Biden on “World News Tonight with David Muir.” The extended interview will appear Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Biden Has Scheduled His First Interview After His Shaky Debate Performance

During last week’s CNN debate, Biden struggled to finish sentences and frequently appeared bewildered while Trump spewed forth falsehoods, raising serious concerns about Biden’s age and capacity to serve a second term.

The interview is a significant coup for ABC News and a watershed moment for Biden following his halting debate performance. Although Biden has made multiple public appearances since the debate, he has read prepared statements at each venue.

This will be his first unscripted appearance since the debate. Several White House supporters have publicly and privately urged Biden to quickly hold a live interview or news conference to allay concerns about the president’s understanding.

ABC did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether it intends to publish the entire unedited interview version. Due to time limits, networks typically trim down programming interviews.

Biden Has Scheduled His First Interview After His Shaky Debate Performance

Biden’s last significant interview was with David Muir in Normandy last month. He earlier spoke with CNN’s Erin Burnett on May 8 and Time magazine’s Massimo Calabresi on May 28.

According to CNN, the interview with ABC will be his fourth major televised interview in 2024. Biden has conducted fewer interviews than his prior predecessors.

SOURCE – (CNN)

US President Joe Biden has responded to attacks about his age, telling supporters in a furious speech that he will win re-election in November. This follows a bad debate performance that raised concerns about his candidacy.

“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he said at a rally in the crucial state of North Carolina on Friday, one day after struggling in the televised duel with his Republican challenger, Donald Trump.

“I don’t walk as smoothly as I used to…”I don’t debate as well as I used to,” he admits. “But I know what I do know, I know how to tell the truth [and] I know how to do this job.”

Joe Biden, 81, said he felt in his “heart and soul” that he could serve another term as a cheering throng in Raleigh yelled, “four more years”.

While issues about Joe Biden’s age are not new, his weak performance on the debate stage, which included verbal blanks, a scratchy voice, and some difficult-to-follow responses, alarmed several Democrats and created new concerns about his campaign.

Mr Biden’s campaign has maintained that the country’s oldest presidential contender is still capable of serving another term. Despite his dismal performance, campaign organizers stated another nominee would not replace him.

“Absolutely not,” Mia Ehrenberg, a Biden campaign spokesperson, responded to concerns about whether Joe Biden would withdraw his candidacy.

While numerous campaign surrogates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, confessed to reporters that the president tripped during the debate, they reaffirmed their support for the older statesman and emphasized that his responses were more meaningful than Mr Trump’s.

“The president might have lost the debate on style, but he won it on facts, decency, and the ideas people think are important in this country,” campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said on CNN the morning after the debate.

In the days afterward, many senior Democrats and Biden supporters have made additional efforts to defend the former president’s performance and allay liberal concerns.

Former President Barack Obama, still one of the party’s most popular icons, remarked that “bad debate nights happen”.

“This election is still a choice between someone who fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself,” Obama said. He continued by stating that Trump is “someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit”.

However, Democratic concerns about Joe Biden are far from allayed.

Party leaders, political operators, and those close to the president who talked with the BBC‘s Katty Kay described a worried party concerned about the strength of their candidate.

Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House Speaker, stated that “from a performance standpoint, it wasn’t great”. Other Democrats, including Biden’s former communications director Kate Bedingfield, described the debate as “a really disappointing debate performance”.

Democratic contributors who talked anonymously to various media sources were more blunt, with one calling the performance “disqualifying”.

“The only way it could have been worse was if he had fallen from the stage. “Big donors are saying… he needs to go,” one Democratic operative told the Financial Times.

On Friday, the New York Times editorial board urged Mr. Biden to drop out. It urged Democrats to “acknowledge that Mr Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place” .

Mr. Trump, however, staged his own rally in Virginia mere hours later, hailing a “big victory” in the debate, which CNN reported was watched by 48 million people on television and millions more online.

“Joe Biden’s problem is not his age,” Trump, 78, added. “It is his competence. He’s quite incompetent.

The former president dismissed suggestions that Biden will withdraw from the race, claiming he “does better in polls” than other Democrats, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Despite concerns raised by certain media pundits, early indications suggest that there has been “no change” in polls following the discussion, according to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump on BBC R4’s Today program.

Later in the program, pollster Frank Luntz stated that there might not be a big change in voters’ intentions because most Americans have already decided who they will vote for later this year.

However, early polls show that American voters saw Mr Trump as the overwhelming winner.

A post-debate poll conducted by liberal pollster Data for Progress revealed that 62% of potential voters who saw or read about the debate believed Trump won. Only 30% of those polled by the progressive polling company said Mr Biden won the debate.

Until more polling is done, fundraising could indicate sustained excitement for Joe Biden’s candidacy; a large shift in that direction could pose a serious challenge to Democrats.

In an apparent effort to demonstrate its continued momentum, the Biden campaign announced that the president had raised $14 million from fundraisers in recent days.

From the Thursday debate until Friday evening, it was reported that Joe Biden had raised more than $27 million for his campaign.

Joe Biden is reportedly expected to meet with other donors on Saturday. He has planned fundraisers in the affluent New York Hamptons and Red Bank, New Jersey.

On the last day of voting before Sunday’s first round of parliamentary elections, France’s conservative National Rally (RN)grew its lead, in an opinion poll that put it close to a majority.

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has been ahead in the polls since President Emmanuel Macron called an unexpected election this month. The election has caused France to be uncertain and has scared its European neighbors and the financial markets.

Les Echos newspaper released a new Opinion Way poll on Friday that showed the National Rally could get as much as 37% of the vote. This is two percentage points more than the poll’s previous score from last week.

The expected vote total for Macron’s moderate Together party was 20%, which is two points less than the previous report. The left-wing group New Popular Front had the same 28% of the vote as before.

In a different poll put together by Elabe, BFM TV found that the RN and its allies could get between 260 and 295 seats in the new parliament. This would put them over the 289-seat threshold needed for an absolute majority, which would give them a clear mandate to rule.

It’s hard to make accurate seat projections because the outcome rests on how 577 constituencies across France vote. Also, after Sunday’s first round, candidates who are against the RN may work together to pull their names from the race in order to beat far-right candidates in the second round on July 7.

To win in the first round, a candidate needs to get an absolute majority of the votes cast as well as votes from at least 25% of the eligible voters in the district. It’s hard to do this, and most districts have to go to a second round of voting. The winner in the second round is the person who got the most votes.

The idea of either an RN-led government or a split parliament has scared the financial markets. On Friday, the risk premium on French government bonds rose to its highest level since the euro zone crisis in 2012.

If the National Rally won the election outright, they would have to “cohabit” with Macron for the rest of his term, until 2027. This would be the first time that a French president had to share power with a party that is not part of the major political party.

National Rally’s Anti – EU Views

The RN has toned down some of its anti-EU views and promised to be responsible with money, but it’s still not clear how it will pay for its election promises or what its strong doubts about the EU will mean for its future unity.

Racism is at the heart of the party’s “French first” policies, even though Le Pen is trying to clean up the party she received from her racist father, Jean-Marie.

In the last TV debate on Thursday, Macron’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said that his RN opponent Jordan Bardella was still letting racist speech happen in his far-right camp. Bardella denied the allegation.

The party has done well because people are angry at Macron. Macron’s choice to run for president in 2017 as the leader of a new, broad-based centrist movement changed French politics and was meant to stop the rise of radical parties.

People say that he made changes that were good for business, but many French voters think that he didn’t care about their worries about the rising cost of living and worsening public services.

Le Pen hinted at the kinds of fights that living together might cause on Friday when she said that an RN prime minister would block Macron’s choice for the French official at the European Commission in Brussels.

She told Europe 1 radio, “The prime minister, not the president, is the one who gets to choose the French commissioner.” A foreign source said Thursday that Macron backed Thierry Breton for a new term. Breton is a former businessman who now oversees the internal markets at the Commission.

Source: Reuters

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